I recently met a friend who used to live in Ireland in the early 1970s. He had an old farmhouse that had been built inside a rath (an embanked Iron Age farmstead). He and his wife wanted to create a vegetable plot, but the ideal spot was obstructed by two large boulders. A neighbouring farmer was asked to come over in his tractor to help remove the offending rocks. When he arrived, the neighbour glanced at the stones embedded in the rath banks and announced that the work couldn’t be done (not by him anyway). “There’s rooms down there,” was all he’d say- before returning home in his tractor. The boulders stayed where they were- and the inhabitants of those rooms, the sidhe folk, were left undisturbed and un-riled. Odd things still happened in the farmhouse, but nothing on the scale of the harassment that would have been provoked had the faery dwellings been seriously interfered with.
Such incidents were- and are- common in Ireland, and Janet Bord in Fairies gives quite a few examples. Roads are diverted to avoid certain rocks and thorn trees; farm improvements are not hazarded. A similar circumspection prevails in Iceland too. However, in Britain, this caution and self-preservation does not any longer seem to exist. There’s plenty of evidence that it once did, but it appears that the British have since become reckless, or careless, or both.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, the faeries frequently live beneath rounded hills, known in the Scottish Highlands as knolls or knowes in English and sithein or tolman in Gaelic. These are normally distinguished by their shape and by the lush green of the grass on them. They provide privacy for the inhabitants, yet at the same time they indicate to humans the faery presence- and the need to approach with caution. You’d think this would act as a warning to people to keep well away, but it doesn’t always work out this way, and, though there’re stories of humans rewarded for showing respect to and, wherever possible avoiding, faery hillocks, there are far more concerning people who’ve violated them.
The wise know these sites are the faeries’ and they take care of them. For instance, in the Highlands an old man kept the hillock near his house very clean by clearing from it any animal droppings or other dirt. He did this mainly because he liked to sit on there on summer evenings, but one dusk a small man whom he didn’t know appeared and thanked him for his care. In return, the stranger promised that if the man’s cattle should stray at night, they would be kept out of the crops. A second farmer, who always avoided pasturing his horses and cows on a hillock and resisted taking turf from the knoll, was rewarded by the faes who would drive his livestock to shelter whenever a storm arose at night.
Knowing that the faeries are down below, some people even go so far as to make offerings to them there. On the Isle of Arran the faeries are especially closely linked to the megalithic complex of Machrie Moor. One of the stone circles there is a double ring called Fion-gal’s Cauldron Seat, beneath which a faery or brownie is known to live. He used to be propitiated by pouring milk into a hole in the side of one of the stones.
We have far more accounts of when things go wrong– for the obvious reason that they serve as lessons for the rest of us. A man on island of Coll went to pull brambles from a faery knowe but heard someone call out angrily to him from inside. He ran away in fright. Even quite minor trespasses can provoke very hostile responses. A man travelling over a hill near Loch Awe paused to rest at the summit, but two enraged faeries appeared and gave him a severe warning not to lounge about on the top of their home. However, he dated to pass the same way again and this time was assaulted by three faeries, who warned him never to come back on pain of even worse.
Fortunately, the faeries will often give the intruder a warning first. Three Perthshire men set out to strip turf from the top of a knoll. When they got there, they all felt suddenly exhausted and lay down for a nap. On awaking later, each had been carried off some distance, one finding himself a quarter of a mile away in a pool. In the similar story, The Fairies of Merlin’s Craig, the offending turf cutter was abducted and forced to swear never to take turves again before he was freed.
An equally non-violent and yet compelling way of getting a human to remedy a trespass is seen in the case of a Scottish woman who dreamed that she was visited by a strange female complaining that the stake used for tethering a cow was letting rain fall onto her child’s cradle. The first night this happened, the woman dismissed it. After the same dream three nights in a row, she realised that it was a message, so she went, closed up the hole she’d made- and ended the dream warnings. In more common versions of this incident, the person who hammers a peg into a knoll to tether a horse is met with complaints from inside that he has made a hole that’s causing a leak. He wisely and immediately agrees to tether his animal elsewhere; sometimes, in gratitude, the inhabitants direct him to the best grazing nearby.
A well known example from Gwynedd in North Wales features a different sort of leak upsetting the faeries. A farmer used to go outside his house to relieve himself every night before bed. One evening, a stranger appeared beside the man complaining about his annoying behaviour. The farmer asked how he could be upsetting a neighbour he’d never seen before, to which the stranger replied that his house was just below where they stood and, if the farmer placed his foot on the other’s, he’d see this. The farmer complied and with the transferred second sight saw clearly that all the slops from his house were going down the chimney of the other’s home, which stood far below in a street he’d never seen before. The faery advised him to put his door in the other side of the house and that, if he did so, his cattle would never suffer from disease.The farmer obeyed and after that time he was prosperous man.
Men building a new house on the Scottish island of Tiree took a stone from a nearby sithean or fairy hill. They had ample warning to desist as the stone kept returning nightly to the place where they found it- but they kept removing it the following day. Eventually, one of the builders fell ill, at which point they realised their error, reburied the stone and gave up. A comparable incident is reported from County Durham in Northern England. Soil was being dug from an old castle near Bishopton when a voice was heard to ask- “Is all well?” The excavators confirmed that it was, to which the voice replied “Then keep well when you’re well and leave the Fairy Hill alone.”
If the human won’t take the hint, he must accept the consequences, which can be dire. An Orkney farmer who dug into a faery mound was confronted by a little grey man who angrily told him that, if he dared to take another spadeful, six of his cows would die and, if he still persisted, there would be six funerals in the family. The man went on- with predictable results. Even disturbances in the vicinity of a fairy knoll can be fatal. On Islay it was decided to reclaim some waste land surrounding a hillock called Cnoc an-t Sithein (Fairy Hill). It should probably have been pretty obvious that this land had been left fallow for a good reason; nonetheless, ploughing started. The first ploughman was killed by one of his horses in an accident; the next person set to the task was cursed with great bad luck. A similar catalogue of misfortunes befell a man on Guernsey who partially demolished La Rocque qui Sonne dolmen. The local faeries then implacably but steadily destroyed every aspect of his life and business. A miller at Rosehall, near Lairg in Sutherland, dug earth from a knoll for his mill dam. The fairies responded instantly, swarming at him and driving him into the sea some twenty miles away before returning to destroy his new mill. This seems relatively mild compared to two cases in which farmers destroyed knolls, as a result of which cattle plague blighted their cows and then spread to all the herds in the district.
So, we have stories from the length and breadth of the British Isles attesting to the belief of past generations that there were, indeed, ‘rooms down there’ and that they had to be respected and preserved. There’s almost no trace of that now. We can even see it vanishing. Samuel Hitchins, in his History of Cornwall (1824 ), said that the faery faith was fading in the county, except amongst the aged and uneducated, but even so:
“By some, even the places of their resort are still pointed out, and particular fields and lanes are distinguished as spots which they were accustomed to frequent. To these bushes and hedges, near which they were presumed to assemble, some degrees of veneration are still attached. An indefinite species of sanctity is still associated with their beaten circles [i.e. faery rings] and it is thought unlucky to injure their haunts or throw any obstacle in their way.”
The traces of respect for faery sites lingered, therefore, in the early nineteenth century. I’d be prepared to bet that it actually persisted a lot later than this, given the continuous human tendency to think that it’s their grandparents’ generation who believed in such things- never their own. Hitchins’ mention of faery rings is, I’d say, significant, because in England it’s probably the case that wariness over rings (both entering them and deliberately damaging them)- and possibly certain trees too, such as the elder– has lasted longer than misgivings associated with hills. Nevertheless, we have become disconnected from the knowledge of our ancestors, perhaps because of the urbanisation and dislocation of the Industrial Revolution. That fact that we’ve forgotten what they learned through bitter experience doesn’t, of course, mean that the faeries have necessarily moved away. There are still ‘rooms down there‘- and we overlook this at our peril.
Many of the cases mentioned are discussed in greater detail in my Darker Side of Faery. See, too, my Faeries & The Natural World and 2020’s Faery.
British Fairies 
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